Chauncey Wright

Chauncey Wright was an American philosopher of science of the second
half of the nineteenth century and an early proponent of Darwinism in
the United States. Sometimes cited as a founder of pragmatism, he is
more appropriately remembered as an original
thinker in the tradition of David Hume and John Stuart
Mill.[1]
Wright's primary interest and originality lay in philosophy of
science, but his insights and influence carried over to other venues,
including philosophy of education and theory of meaning. Wright
exercised a great influence at a crucial time in American cultural
life — in the 1860s and 70s, when the force of religious piety
and Transcendentalism was waning. He was a tireless critic of
metaphysics and the natural theology he believed it served, but he was
also a discriminating interpreter of principles in science and
philosophy. He wrote little and his influence was exerted by means of
conversation and philosophical discussion with the circle of
intellectuals and academics centered in Cambridge, Mass. from
1850–75. This circle included Charles S. Peirce, William James,
and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., all of whom acknowledged Wright's
influence.[2]

Wright accepted Hume's rejection of rational a priori knowledge and,
following the positivist Auguste Comte (1789–1857), he applied
Hume's lesson to theory in science. Wright regarded theory as a
grammar or logical template for organizing sense experience, which was
the only true origin of knowledge. As such, theory was a labor-saving
device and usually mathematical in character. Some theoretical
entities were real, but it is extremely difficult to settle upon any
as surely real, given the method of science. That method is
verification. Wright used the term verification to mean the testing of
theories by deducing from them consequences that can be confirmed by
direct perception, the “undoubted testimony of the senses”
(PD 47). What are verified are predicted consequences of
theory. This commitment to the sensory base of ideas both at the
beginning and end of scientific investigation reinforced Wright's
belief that utility is what makes both nature and human affairs
intelligible. The principle of utility informed his understanding of
Darwin's Origin of Species as offering not axioms for deduction
but descriptive principles, in particular natural selection, that
encompassed a wide range of disparate causes of change in
organisms. From this vantage point on science, Wright became a
penetrating interpreter and a brilliant defender of Darwinism in its
introduction into the United States. In what follows, Wright's
philosophy of science will be presented, highlighting the character of
his empiricism as it is revealed through his understanding of
induction. The influence of Mill's utilitarianism will be evident in
his interpretation of Darwin, which is presented next. The nature of
his positivism and his views on cosmology and natural theology are
followed by a general characterization of his scientific
philosophy.

Chauncey Wright was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1830, where
his family had lived since colonial times and where his father had
been a merchant and deputy-sheriff of the county. In 1848, he entered
Harvard College. His education there included two years of advanced
study in natural sciences. Graduating in 1852, he took employment with
the Nautical Almanac office in Cambridge as a computer. This work
constituted his livelihood throughout his life. He concentrated his
work for each year into the last three months of the year, devoting
the rest of the time to his own studies in the logic of science and
metaphysics.

The first philosophical influence on Wright was the Scottish
realist, Sir William Hamilton, whose works formed the curriculum for
Francis Bowen's teaching of philosophy at Harvard. Wright was, however,
greatly influenced by John Stuart Mill's criticism of Hamilton, and the
influence of Mill is evident in Wright's views on utility in science
and ethics. The great conversion of his life came, however, with his
reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859.
Wright became an American defender of Darwin against his religious
antagonists and also, like Harvard's Asa Gray, against Darwin's
scientific critics in America.

Wright taught for a short time at Harvard, but was not successful as
a lecturer. He was an intellectual conversationalist and
through his participation in a succession of study groups in Cambridge,
influenced Charles S. Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr., among others. In spite of his perspicacity and his dispassionate
logical approach to discussion, he also had a gentle, sometimes
angelic, temperament. Children liked him and he was willing to spend
time entertaining them. He was close to Charles Eliot Norton and his
family and exchanged many letters with Norton's sisters. When his
friends were away for extended periods, Wright's spirits and health
suffered. He endured two bouts of deep depression from which his
friends roused him. Among his friends Wright counted both William and
Henry James. William James said of Wright, “Never in a human head
was contemplation more separated from desire.” Wright died of a
stroke in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1875, at the age of
45.[3]

Wright's writings are contained in two volumes, Philosophical
Discussions, a collection of his articles published in American
and British periodicals of the time, and Letters, collected
shortly after his death by his friend James B.
Thayer.[4]
Two fundamental epistemological themes are prominent throughout his
work: 1) sense perception provides the only evidence whose authority
all humankind acknowledges, and 2) sense experience alone can produce
the conviction and permanence that we believe knowledge should
have. The first point addresses the problem of the diversity of truth
claims, the second the expectation that genuine truth claims not be
superseded. He said:

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the
senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible
experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely
passive, and over which the individual will and character have no
control. Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief;
though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which
ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds
have or can be made to have through their agreements. (L
96)

Conviction should be accompanied by consensus, and only sense
perception can claim consensus among honest investigators. Wright often
acknowledged there were legitimate sources of belief besides
sense perception — faith or rational introspection for instance
— but none of them were adequate as sources of
knowledge. Wright did not analyze sense experience into sense
data, preferring to trust the holistic character of ordinary experience
and most scientific observation. He introduced no theory of perception
nor did he address the possible contamination of sense experience by
preconceived notions. He rather placed the weight of conviction upon
the employment of verification, which he allied at different times with
scientific method, the philosophical doctrine of induction, and Comte's
positivism. He said that the ancients did not make more progress in
science because “they did not, or could not, verify their
theories” (PD 45). Furthermore, all that really
distinguishes metaphysics from science in the modern era is that
metaphysics lacks method and “well-grounded canons of research
and criticism” (PD 366).

Wright, then, regarded the nature of verification as evident and
without problems of interpretation. Verification was part of the
solution to the problems that beset theory-making and explanation,
e.g., the competing claims about what theoretical entities exist, and
what factors should militate for or against acceptance of any theory
or cosmology. Asserting the priority of verification as the judge of
theory, Wright said that discussion of the origin of theories or any
claim for their a priori character is of no moment in
science, “which maintains strict neutrality toward all
philosophical systems” (PD 47). He said that the only
difference between theories and facts is that theories are more
complex and less directly testable (PD 44). Unlike later
logical positivists, however, Wright did not hold that terms or
descriptions for theoretical entities were meaningless or to be
resolved only into propositions stating their verifiable
consequences. The unobservables postulated by science are “for
the purpose of giving a material or visual basis to the phenomena and
empirical laws of life in general” (PD 164–65),
and some of them will be proven to exist. In this regard, he likened
Darwin's gemmule theory to Newton's corpuscular theory of light and
the molecular theory of matter. In alluding to the difficulty of
representing the extremely small size of molecules as measured by
Thomson, Wright said:

But there is no reason to doubt that in every such molecule
there are still subordinate parts and structures; or that, even in
these parts, a still finer order of parts and structures exists, at
least to the extent of assimilated growth and simple division.
Mr. Darwin supposes such growths and divisions in the vital gemmules.
(PD 166)

The important thing about hypothesized unobservables is that they be
related to actual phenomena in such a way as to have verifiable
consequences.

Even at this, unobservables should not be specialized natures or
forces taken to account just for certain phenomena. This was,
according to Wright, the problem with scholastic substantial forms
(PD 166–67). His criticism of metaphysical concepts was
that they are empirically poor; they do not link different phenomena
and do not generate predictions that can be verified at the level of
the tangible and visible. Unlike early modern critics of scholastic
metaphysical concepts, Wright did not claim that scientific concepts
are by comparison clear and simple. Indeed, theoretical entities in
modern science can be hard to represent to ourselves because of the
limitations of our conceptions to perceptible forms and properties
(PD 166). Wright speculated that there were “orders of
forces” between the physico-chemical and the vital, just as
there are intermediate phenomena between the vegetative functions of
an animal and sensibility, i.e., sensation and perception. But since
sensibility presents the elements from which conceptions of size and
movement must come, our conceptions of forces and hidden elements are
limited to the sensible (PD 167). There are thus areas of
nature we would investigate that are largely inaccessible to us
because of empirical limitations. Wright did not resort to
reductionism to bridge this gap in our knowledge. He said, “Can
sensibility and the movements governed by it be derived directly by
chemical synthesis from the forces of inorganic elements? It is
probable, both from analogy and direct observation, that they
cannot” (PD 167). To determine what theoretical
entities are real is difficult but is nevertheless the task of
science, which always concerns itself with
facts.[5]

Given the realist tendency of his treatment of unobservables, indirect
verification is an important part of Wright's conception of the
empirical basis of all knowledge. The theory of gravity, which Wright
takes to be proven, “fails to become a fact in the proper
sense” because it can never be verified by direct and immediate
sensory activity. Its truth must be verified indirectly. He said:

Modern science deals then no less with theories than with
facts, but always as much as possible with the verification of
theories, — if not to make them facts by simple verification
through experiment and observation, at least to prove their truth by
indirect verification (PD 45).

Wright did not elaborate upon the difference between direct and indirect
verification in actual practice. He had much more to say about differences in
method between science and philosophy. He believed that all branches of
knowledge had to follow the method of verification belonging to
science. The “philosophy of method” is incomplete, however,
in that it cannot say what constitutes verification in all the
departments of knowledge. Because there is no “complete inventory
of our primary sources of knowledge,” there can be disagreement
as to what constitutes a legitimate appeal to observation or what is a
real verification (PD 45). Platonists or rationalists claim
verification for their theories because they have made an observation
of what reason reveals to them. In fact, they have made an induction
from rational introspection (PD 46). The positivists' claim,
which Wright endorsed, is simply that “verification by reason
settles nothing” and that only data from sensible experience are
reliable enough to admit ideas into the range of what is held to be
true.

Wright added to this that verification means empirical judgment made
upon deduction of consequences, not induction either from
sense data or examination of self-consciousness (PD 47).
Nevertheless, even science that aims at a complete empiricism must
admit some “ideal or transcendental elements.” In every
case, however, these elements must yield consequences that are
testable, either by themselves or in conjunction with empirically
derived notions (PD 47). For example, from Wright's
standpoint, the cosmological theory that the universe is developing,
not just changing, might be a plausible interpretation of the data
available to astronomers of his day. But he thought the notion of
development relies implicitly on the idea of an end or culmination. So
this “development theory,” which he calls
“transcendental,” must still submit to empirical test
(PD 17, 118). He denied Kant's division of knowledge into
“data of experience and conditions of
experience” and so did not admit the transcendental in the sense
of the rational a priori (L 106).

Despite Wright's distinguishing verification from induction, the
latter, nevertheless, played an important role in his philosophy of
science. Induction is relevant to his views of what makes for a
rigorous science and what constitutes truth in science. Wright did not
think it informative to contrast intuition and induction, because they
do not refer to different ultimate grounds of belief (PD
373). Intuition is “rapid, instinctive judgment, whether in the
objective sensible perception of relatively concrete matters, or in
the most abstract” (PD 372). Intuition is properly
contrasted to inference, i.e., reasoning, whether inductive or
deductive. ‘Inductive,’ then, refers to the a posteriori
source of reasoning, i.e., from evidence. It does not refer
to a procedure for generalizing from evidence. He said, “In
their primary signification and in this connection the terms
‘induction’ and ‘inductive’ refer directly to
evidences, and not to any special means and processes of collating and
interpreting them” (PD 372). So, induction may begin
from a variety of sources. What philosophers, either Platonist or
Cartesian, usually call intuition he understood to be induction from
the data of self-consciousness.

Even induction from sense experience is not of one type. It may
start with evidence taken from different levels of perceptual and
experiential complexity and is at work at different stages of an
investigation. This approach to induction is guided by the character of
scientific knowledge itself, which Wright understood to be the relating
of particular facts to more general ones (PD 205–206). But it
also follows the character of natural phenomena. In biology in
particular, the new science of evolution concerns the “external
economy of life” and thus must investigate an accumulation of
related facts of observation at the level of secondary causes
(PD 99–100). Induction may come from ordinary experience,
experiment, or the inspections of the field naturalist. He said,
“Inductions are still performed for the most part unconsciously
and unsystematically…. But when and however ideas are developed
science cares nothing, for it is only by subsequent tests of sensible
experience that ideas are admitted into the pandects of science”
(PD 47).

For Wright, no axioms of science can be absolute. He said:

But all that is really implied in the name [axiom] is that
truths when called axioms are used for the deductive
proof of other truths, and that their own proof is not involved in the
process. This does not deny, however, that they may be, as truths, the
conclusions of other processes; to wit, the inductions of experience.
If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of
concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent
in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths
already reached give direction to further research (L
109).

In this passage, axioms are not foundational in an
epistemological sense. We seek simple principles of physical reality
but must be wary of taking them as foundations in the sense of
ultimate simple facts. The only ultimate in knowledge is recourse to
the empirical in verification. Though verification depends on
deduction, it does not depend on absolutely true starting points of
deduction to yield reliable knowledge. This part of Wright's view
reflects his assimilation of the positivist understanding of science
as a taxonomy of practical experience with nature.

Several issues were involved in the view of science as a taxonomy or
grammar. The influential French positivist, Auguste Comte, along with
scientific positivists like Mach, distrusted theoretical concepts in
science because they saw that these concepts rely on elements of
practical
experience.[6]
A prime example was the relation of the concept of gravity to the
experience of weight on the surface of the earth. Comte said that
gravitation is a “general fact” which is itself “a
mere extension of [a fact] which is perfectly familiar to us, and
which we therefore say that we know; — the weight of bodies on
the surface of the earth” (Comte 28–29). Positivists
believed we cannot avoid the anthropomorphic origin of theoretical
concepts. It had, however, become clear to positivists who were
actually engaged in the practice of science that the structure of a
science is what sustains prediction, not the meaning
of the theoretical terms of the science. A system of principles
constitutes a logical form of explanation, and the ability of the
system of principles to link disparate phenomena, more than concepts,
is the truth in science. As a result, descriptions of the
logical character of a science come to the fore in discussions of
theory.

Wright's emphasis on verification, his pluralism about induction, and
his focus on the logical character of scientific principles together
show that he had absorbed important aspects of scientific
positivism. He often highlighted scientific theory as classificatory
(PD 363) and emphasized the relating of higher and lower
levels of generality as the hallmark of science. He referred to the
positivists often and to Comte in particular. In a passage that
parallels Auguste Comte, Wright said that every scientific distinction
is of value in classification and “must coincide with and be of
use as a sign of other distinctions — that is, be a mark of the
things distinguished by it” (PD
370).[7]

This passage points to Wright as a link between Comte's positivism and
C.S. Peirce, who believed that concepts are indexical signs. Although
he had no semiotic theory, Wright's view of scientific discourse as a
device substituting for useless thought made him sensitive to the role
of signs (PD 280). Wright also identified the objective value
of science with its use. He meant by this “its relatedness or
ulterior value, whether as leading to other and wider ranges of
knowledge, or as a discipline of the mind, or even as leading to
‘bread and butter’” (PD 282). Peirce, as is
well-known, insisted that the meaning of a concept is its use
or effect. In contrast, Wright believed theoretical statements have
meaning other than their effects, but the truth of the statements is
judged by whether predicted effects or results are
verified.[8]

His own approach to signs is evident in his speculation, undertaken
at the urging of Darwin, about the origin of self-consciousness. Here
Wright treated concepts as images. He traced the emergence of
self-consciousness in terms of human awareness of different kinds of
signs (usually vocal, he said) that recall images in thought. The
images themselves act as signs when a human being reasons, but
“with reference to the more vivid outward signs, they are, in the
animal mind, merged in the things signified, like stars in the light of
the sun” (PD 209). The conscious awareness of the
difference between outward and inward signs is crucial to human
awareness, he believed. This awareness may have come with the
“consciousness of simultaneous internal and external
suggestion” and the recognition of the outward sign as a
substitute for the inward sign (PD 210). The key to
rationality is the outward sign itself, i.e., elements of language,
being made the object of attention (PD
206).[9]

It is worth noting that, in a letter of 1869, Wright used the term
consilience to explain the advantages of positivism over the
“older
philosophy.”[10]
Positivism, he said, is a system of “universal methods,
hypotheses, and principles” founded on the sciences. It is not a
universal science itself but must be “coextensive with actual
knowledge, and exhibit the consilience of the sciences” (L,
141). Consilience was a term used by William Whewell in 1858 to
describe the coherence and mutual consistency of different scientific
disciplines as they develop. This coherence, for Whewell, was a test
of the truth of the
sciences.[11]

In summary, Wright's understanding of
science and its method are distinguished by (1) his refusal to theorize about sense data
and his consequent grounding of empiricism in the type of data
available to everyday perceiving, (2) his nuanced treatment of
induction, which rejects Cartesian starting points, and (3) his
combination of verification with methodological realism about theoretical
entities.

Wright was in advance of his contemporaries in his understanding
of Darwin's change in organisms and species, in part because he
applied the foregoing interpretation of science to Darwin's
theory. Wright highlighted the overall structure of the theory of
evolution, which he believed illustrated the principle of utility. He
also characterized evolutionary change in terms of different levels of
causative and explanatory principles. Natural selection is a
descriptive principle that unifies these other principles in a
comprehensive account. It is a template, a form of explanation, by
which an investigator may be guided in finding how more basic
explanatory principles — the principles of chemistry and the
laws of inheritance, for instance — issue in features of living
things observable by direct perception.

Wright said that natural selection is a manifestation of the
all-pervasive principle of utility, which governs adaptation. Utility
he characterized in this way: “Let the questions of the uses of
life, then, be put in this shape: To what ascertainable form or phase
of life is this or that other form or phase of life valuable or
serviceable?” (L 274–75). Features or parts of a living
thing are forms or phases of life that serve the organism's more
general functions and its survival. Perception of colors, for instance,
serves to avoid the effects of dispersion of light in perception and to
make possible definition of objects in vision through limits in
sensibility (L 279). Using teleological language without
teleological intent, he said, “Colors were invented by Nature to
avoid the confusing effects of dispersion” (L 279). The
physical laws of optics in this case lend themselves to an adaptation
useful to living things.

Theorists of evolution are sometimes criticized for offering
‘just so’ stories of adaptation. How a given serviceable
feature might have evolved is taken as tantamount to how it actually
did evolve. There is, however, a valuable insight about the nature of
evolutionary science to be gleaned from the practice of giving likely
stories of evolution. The general form of explanation by utility is
more important than which particular explanation by natural selection
is advanced to explain a feature or structure. At this very early
stage of reception of Darwin's theory, Wright had already realized
this. In correspondence with Darwin, Wright said, “The inquiry
as to which of several real uses is the one through which
natural selection has acted for the development of any faculty or
organ … has for several years seemed to me a somewhat less
important question than it seemed formerly and still appears to most
thinkers on the subject” (L 335). Wright thought there
might be a plurality of uses for the same feature in the history of an
organism. Sometimes these uses are contemporaneous; at other times
they succeed one another in the course of evolution. Wright believed
that thinking in terms of natural selection would shed light on
physiological questions and connect chemical and physical explanations
to the more complicated phenomena of life (PD 296). He
realized that natural selection promised to be a research program for
investigation that would unify biological science.

Wright strongly criticized Herbert Spencer's philosophy of
evolution, both because of its excessive claims for the range of
evolution and because of Spencer's understanding of evolution as a
force or operative cause. There is no Law of Evolution applicable to
nature and civilization. Spencer's examples drawn from the history of
civilization are not truly scientific and are “liable to the
taint of teleological and cosmological conception.” (PD
73). Wright said, “To us Mr. Spencer's speculation seems but the
abstract statement of the cosmological conceptions, and that kind of
orderliness which the human mind spontaneously supplies in the absence
of facts sufficiently numerous and precise to justify sound scientific
conclusions” (PD 73). In a review of a collection of
essays by Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer of the principle of natural
selection, Wright said:

Strictly speaking, Natural Selection is not a cause at all,
but is the mode of operation of a certain quite limited class of
causes. Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of
nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than
upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited
even in the phenomena of organic life (PD 108).

Wright held that three different “classes of causes” are
involved in natural selection. The first has to do with the external
conditions of the life of a living thing, its relation to other
organisms and the non-organic world. Second are physical laws; he
mentions specifically principles of mechanics, optics, and acoustics.
These are the best known and most basic of all the principles of
science. They are the principles by which means come to be fitted to
ends, the fulfilling or supplying of the needs of the organism. They
are the laws in accordance with which an arm or wing, an eye or ear,
can be of use. Third are the causes introduced by Darwin, “the
little known phenomena of variation, and their relations to the laws of
inheritance” (PD 142). He said there are several
divisions within this third class, distinguishing in particular
diversities always existing in a population from abnormal or unusual
variations. In responding to St. George Mivart's criticism of natural
selection, he said that diversities existing normally in a population
are the source of evolutionary change more than “unusual and
monstrous variations” (PD 144). Wright made this point
both to highlight the level at which natural selection operates and to
drive home the role of natural selection as an alternative to
teleological explanations of the usefulness of adaptations. Variations
in inherited characteristics in individuals are not themselves the
direct causes of changes in species. Natural selection is a complex
general fact of which utility is the organizing principle.

Wright's study of Mill's utilitarianism undoubtedly influenced his
understanding of Darwin. Although he rejected Spencer's application of
the principle of evolution to history and civilization, he thought many
aspects of human behavior and psychology could be treated by the
principle of natural selection. Utilitarian ethics provided a model for
him. He used the way humans make moral choices as an analogy for
unconscious selection in the change of human language over time.
Utility is not the motive of moral decision-makers. In the moral agent
thinking rightly according to his principle of virtue, conscience will
display the utilitarian principle. Similarly, there may be a variety of
motives for adoption of a change in linguistic form or behavior:
authority, ease of pronunciation, or distinctness from other
utterances. The adoption of the change is what concerns natural
selection. Natural selection shows the utility implicit unconsciously
in selection by the agency of one of these motives (L 244). In
commenting on moral behavior itself, Wright in effect based ethics on
human nature, because of the importance he accorded to habit in human
behavior:

The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the
inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature
has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and
she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours. So
that, practically, we find ourselves acting the more reasonably and
more for the real ends of nature, in proportion as these are not our
immediate motives, but give place to more completely devoted,
single-purposed, and therefore effective powers, or to instincts and
habits (L 242).

We see in this passage the separation of immediate causes of action,
namely pleasure and pain, from the pattern of action serving nature's
real end, namely utility. Wright thought utilitarianism needed, as a
supplement, a developed philosophy of habit. In a way similar to his
explanation of natural selection, he separated (1) the conditions
militating toward habit, (2) immediate motives for choosing action, and
(3) the larger principle governing selection of
action.[12]

Wright labored in his essays and review articles to make Darwin's
theory understandable to the educated American public by countering the
questions about what kind of explanation natural selection offered.
Realizing that utility as a principle provided the logical form for
Darwin's theory, he insisted that natural selection could not submit to
requirements of demonstration. It could not serve as an axiom from
which deduction starts. Indeed, it should be compared to the principle
of gravitation not as this concept figured in celestial mechanics or
even in the laboratory but as gravitation is manifest “in the
concrete courses of outward nature, in meteorology and physical
geology.” Natural selection could be compared to the fundamental
laws of political economy, as these laws actually emerge in the fixing
of value and prices through demand and supply (PD 137). Here
we see both the influence of utilitarianism and Wright's belief in the
interdependence of different levels of explanatory principles.

His understanding of induction figures also in his defense of
Darwin. In a review essay of 1870, he commented on the almost universal
acceptance of Darwin's theory by the scientifically minded and
attributed its success to “the skillful combination of inductive
and deductive proofs with hypothesis.” This combination must
rely, however, on a preceding simpler induction, he said. The near
simultaneous discovery by Wallace and Darwin of the principle behind
biological evolution testifies to their ability as naturalists to
appreciate “the force of obscure and previously little studied
facts” (PD 99). In this context, he also insisted upon
the importance to science of investigating principles operating at a
level in nature comparable to the level of political economy. He said
that to fail to investigate a principle operating at the level of the
whole organism or at the level of populations would go against the
“Aristotelian” tendency of mind of the scientific culture.
The scientific mind cannot regard the intricate system of adaptations
in nature as arbitrary and is not satisfied “so long as any
explanation, not tantamount to arbitrariness itself, has any
probability in the order of nature” (PD 100).

In responding both to friends and enemies of Darwin's evolution,
Wright sought to keep clear the minimal meaning of natural selection in
scientific terms. In this way, he did great service to Darwin. Like a
good positivist, he was protecting the new theory of evolution from
annexation into cosmological speculation or alliance with the final
causality that was always a part of natural
theology.[13]

Wright had interesting and original views about the origin of the
universe and changes in the
heavens.[14]
He saw no evidence in astronomical data or known scientific law for
ascribing purpose or direction to the evolution of the cosmos as a
whole. He believed it most likely that the universe is eternal,
constituting “an order without beginning and without
termination” (PD 4). It is governed by the principle of
“counter-movements,” which he believed was manifest
already in biological phenomena in the cycle of life and death,
nutrition and decay. Gravitation and heat were the chief forces
involved in counter-movements. Geology manifests the principle, in the
relation of forces producing elevations, compressions, erosion, and
deposits, and it is even more markedly evident in meteorological
phenomena. Wright believed that changes in interstellar space
constituted, in a way similar to meteorology, “cosmical
weather” (PD 10). He was concerned that the nebular
hypothesis of the origin of solar systems, presented as a plausible
scientific hypothesis by Laplace and supported by the observations of
Herschel, was too readily taken in support of a “developmental
hypothesis” about the universe, namely that the universe was
created and had evolved toward an end congenial to supporting human
life. For Wright, teleological notions in science were always
anathema. He accepted the nebular hypothesis in terms of the physical
laws that yielded the developmental hypothesis, both in astronomy and
biology. But he called it the “derivative hypothesis” to
connote the fact that “in several classes of phenomena hitherto
regarded as ultimate and inexplicable, physical explanations are
probable and legitimate” (PD 17). He meant by this that
scientific cosmology need entertain no extra-scientific principles as
fundamental: “the constitution of the solar system is not
archetypal, as the ancients supposed, but the same corrupt mixture of
law and apparent accident that the phenomena of the earth's surface
exhibit” (PD 9).

Wright was aware that the second law of thermodynamics militated
against his cosmology of cosmic weather continuing in an endless
succession of phenomena in infinite time. But he believed the
“tendency to diffuse the mechanical energies of nature”
that was characteristic of the laws of heat was considered too narrowly
by Thomson and others. There was a “round of actions” in
the complex interactions of heat and gravitation through space that set
up the counter-movements of continuous change (L 177). To the
scientific Aristotelian mind that Wright claimed to have, the theory of
“wasting” raised more questions than it answered, and so he
deferred his own full acceptance of it (PD 87). Wright's
approach to this issue illustrates his penchant, evident also in his
acute and ready understanding of natural selection, to focus on
large-scale effects of natural law as making sense of nature. In this,
his mind worked against the reductionist tendencies of philosophers who
had less experience with and sympathy for science itself. He was
interested in the persistent patterns evident to sense perception set
up by the operation of natural law at levels inaccessible to
perception.

A constant theme for Wright is the rejection of
natural theology. He did not believe that there could be philosophical
arguments, starting from natural phenomena, whether motion or the
intelligible forms of living things, that prove the existence of a
deity. He also believed it was impossible to identify in nature genuine
final causes, ends present naturally that are always prior to the
subordinate causes that bring about those ends. He said:

By what criterion … can we distinguish among the
numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that
may, for aught we can know, be also effects, — how can we
distinguish which are the means and which are the ends? (PD
36).

That the universe has a purpose or that the forms of living things
given by nature have an inevitability or natural priority to them can
be believed on grounds of faith but can in no way be disclosed or
supported by scientific investigation of nature. Perhaps judging from
the state of philosophy and theology in the American institutions of
higher learning in the mid-nineteenth century, Wright believed that
metaphysics had no other purpose than the service of natural theology.
He was never precise about what he meant by metaphysics, but he said
that the motives for theological and metaphysical speculation come
from “the active emotional life of man” (PD
49–50). He seemed to equate metaphysics and philosophy. He
continued, “The questions of philosophy proper are human desires
and fears and aspirations — human emotions — taking an
intellectual form” (PD 50). A spirit of inquiry free of
these influences motivates science, but it is “necessarily, at
all times, a weak feeling” and could have little effect on
civilization until a body of scientific learning had been
developed. He said, “And we owe science to the combined energies
of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress
inherent in civilization” (PD 51). Philosophy belongs
with the fine arts and religion. Its attainments are not great but its
motives are noble (PD 52). This ad hominen argument
against philosophers — that their enterprise is not rational and
disinterested — would have found ready reinforcement in Comte's
rejection of metaphysics in favor of scientific method. Wright never
followed Comte, however, in Comte's recommendation of a religion of
humanity to take the place of religion for the masses. Although
Wright's own thinking is highly philosophical, the rejection of
metaphysics and philosophy together is fundamental for him and lies in
the background of all his pronouncements in philosophy of science.

Wright's philosophical position is a type of naturalism, though not a
naturalism endorsed by most twentieth century philosophers who have
used that term. Given his view of philosophy, he resisted skepticism,
idealism, and realism, regarding them all as defects of
thought. Nevertheless, compared to twentieth century philosophies of
science, his own philosophy of science is decidedly realist. He
believed scientists discover structures and features of natural
things, and previously unknown hidden entities, as well as phenomenal
laws that govern the behavior of natural things. In this respect, his
positivism is methodological and precautionary, a preparation for
scientific realism. In treating the origin of consciousness, he said
that idealism and natural realism are the two philosophical positions
to issue from taking sense data and emotions as the primarily real. In
idealism, the conscious subject is immediately known through his
perceptions, i.e., the phenomena, and the existence of an external
world can only be an inference from the phenomena known to belong to
the self (PD 230). He rejected this but also rejected natural
realism, which holds that “both the subject and object are
absolutely, immediately, and equally known through their essential
attributes in perception.” This view, he says, “is more
than an unlearned jury are competent to say” (PD
231).

According to Wright, the immediacy of sensible qualities to
consciousness entails that there is no way to separate subject and
object in consciousness. But, he continued:

All states of consciousness are, it is true, referred to
one or the other, or partly to each of the two worlds [subject and
object]; and this attribution is, in part at least, instinctive, yet
not independent of all experience, since it comes either from the
direct observation of our progenitors, or, possibly, through the
natural selection of them; that is, possibly through the survival of
those who rightly divided the worlds, and did not often mistake a real
danger for a dream or for an imagined peril, nor often mistake a dream
of security for reality. If. . . we mean by immediacy such an
instinctive attribution, independent of repeated connections of
attributes in their subject through the individual's own experiences,
then “natural realism” is most in accordance with our view.
(PD 231)

In this quotation, Wright suggests that the division of subject
from object may constitute “rightly dividing the world” as
indexed by survival value. A division made in these terms, rather than
by an individual's experiences of himself and the world, is a
reasonable basis for natural realism. Wright's view in this passage is
consistent with the position of Hume that human beings by nature make
connections between ideas and the world and that skepticism about
these connections is useless and idle. In this regard, Wright's
position anticipates that of P.F. Strawson, a twentieth-century
logical analyst. Strawson said our beliefs, e.g., in the existence of
bodies, “are not grounded beliefs and at the same time are not
open to serious doubt” (Strawson 1985, 19). Wright here
articulates a similar point couched in terms of natural selection of
beliefs. Also like Strawson, Wright took for some purposes ordinary
experience as what is primarily real, while for other purposes he took
the entities and properties given in physical theory as the real. This
pluralistic approach came from Wright's acceptance of different levels
of experience as equally valid starting points for science. Also
evident in this passage, however, is the way Wright made biological
evolution the basis for all other accounts of nature and human
psychology. In this respect, his approach is a forerunner of John
Dewey's philosophy of nature.